exoplanets

Astronomers at the University of Canterbury (UC) have found an incredibly rare new Super-Earth planet towards the center of the galaxy. The planet is one of only a handful that have been discovered with both size and orbit comparable to that of Earth.

There may be multitudes of Earth-like planets sprinkled throughout the Milky Way galaxy, but they are not so easy to find. To date, only around a third of the over 4,000 exoplanets found and confirmed are rocky – and most of those are within a few thousand light-years of Earth.

Not too close, but not too far. That’s long been the rule describing how distant a planet should be from its star in order to sustain life. But a new study challenges that adage: A planet can maintain water and other liquids on its surface if it’s heated, not by starlight, but by radioactive decay, researchers calculate. That opens up the possibility for many planets—even free-floating worlds untethered to stars—to host life, they speculate.